Work in Progress: Notes On Wet and Messy Suitplay.

Southern Suitor
May 19
4 min read

This post is a work in progress. Sir will continue updating this post in the coming days. Stay tuned.

Whenever I ask folks what got them into suits and ties as a fetish or a kink, I provide some version of the following explanations:

For Me, it was the old Indiana Jones and James Bond movies. I enjoyed watching well-dressed protagonists getting into compromising situations, their fine suits and ties or tuxedos getting untucked, disheveled, sweaty, dirty, or wet.

When I was ten or eleven, I would have these long, drawn-out fantasies of well-dressed CEOs in suits and ties stranded on desert islands, forced to subsist on whatever they could find, their suits slowly getting wet, torn, and ruined over the course of their Robinsonade.

Both of these "origin" stories are true. For many of us, there is no one single event that "sparks" a fetish or kink. Rather, it's a whole constellation of popular culture references, scattered memories, or other cobbled-together fantasies that eventually coalesce to make the whole. So this edition of my "Suited Commentary" is an attempt to account for a side of suitfetish that I've been pondering as of late: wet and messy.

Notes Wet and Messy Suitplay

Background: Popular Culture.

Art, literature, and popular culture abound in images of ruined clothing. Whether the clothing is torn, muddied, gunged, disheveled; or whether the clothing is casual or formal; there is a consistent trope of a character who starts off in excellent duds, and somehow finds their clothing ruined by circumstances. The "Doomed New Clothes" trope lists only heterosexual instances of this imagery: it is always a princess, or a female protagonist, whose dress gets ruined. It is heterosexual, of course, because the presumed audience is heterosexual men, and the ruination of the heroine's clothing offers a titillating glimpse of her body underneath. It's a form of forced clothing removal that creates a sense of vulnerability, a power imbalance, and, in many ways, conjures metaphors for sex.

As queer kinksters, we search out the forms of media that offer us glimpses of what we desire. Scenes of interest are those moments when a piece of non-sexual, heteronormative popular media offers us a glimpse of the kinds of things we enjoy. And, for us suit fetishists, it is already rare enough to see a male character subjected to clothing damage, and even rarer to see a male character in a suit and tie subjected to the same. This is because, to the presumed heterosexual male audience, women are assumed to be passive objects of sexual desire, and men's bodies are therefore supposed to be concealed from sexual view. Men are the ones doing the desiring, and women are the ones being desired. It is, thus, rarer to find images of male characters getting their clothing damaged in any kind of revealing way.

Yet those images, few and far between, have all the greater an effect when we stumble upon them. We save the images we find, creating archives or video clips of these pieces of popular media that preserve the moments that inspire and "inspire" us, those rare glimpses of scenarios we wish we could enact in real life.

However, in much of hetero media, wet and messy clothing damage doesn't operate in an explicitly kinky way. It instead operates as a more generic trope of humiliation, vulnerability, or as a trope to heighten the emotional impact of a scene.

When I interviewed various kinksters on Instagram, many pointed to children's media. Nickelodeon's Double Dare series frequently features slime as a comic schtick or spectacle. Slapstick is a common feature of cartoons and other children's media, often with suited characters as the butt of the joke. From a kinkster's perspective, the wet-and-messy components of these forms of media create narratives of humiliation and comeuppance: the well-dressed character is coded as wealthy or powerful, so we delight in watching him get taken down a notch.

In action and horror media, the trope of wet-and-messy clothing operates in a somewhat different way: exertion, clothing damage as a kind of visual "hit point bar" for the characters. The more damaged the character's clothing, the higher the stakes, higher tension. Indiana Jones and James Bond follow many of the clothes-ruining tropes we see in action movies: a well-dressed protagonist enacts various feats of heroism dressed to the nines, but, in climactic moments (oh no!) his fine suits pay the price of his daring deeds. The Avengers (Sean Connery, Ralph Fiennes, 1998) likewise features a duel between two well-dressed contenders amidst the surging waves. Or, similarly, The "Mr. Fixit" variation of The Incredible Hulk or other comic books such as Doc Savage also channel the clothing damage trope as part of their visual vocabulary of heroism. Both comic books feature characters in suits, and their suits don't make it to the last page intact.

All this is to say that heterosexual, vanilla content creators create images that inspire us as kinksters, regardless of whether their intentions are kinky. Whenever we see characters in popular media whose clothes get torn or ruined, that imagery often serves some kind of narrative purpose instead of an erotic one. It is us as kinksters who get to take those images and transform them into sources of pleasure.